Always Yours
by Alceriniel
Summary: "It's been three years..." Varric's romantic recounting of what occurred the night the two lovers finally came together is sweet enough, but sometimes the truth of the matter is far more more beautiful and gentle than even the most silver tongue can weave


Hawke shifted nervously before the stone fireplace, tugging at the tem of her finery and growing more agitated with each passing second. _Where is he_? She thought to herself feverishly, pulling her gaze away from the fire and walking over to her small balcony, hoping to catch a glimpse of him walking towards the estate. Certainly not the direction he would come from if he came from Dusktown, but if he were coming from the direction of the Hanged Man…

_Ugh!_ She clenched her fists and pressed them against her thighs as she gritted her teeth together. _This is insanity. Of course he isn't coming! I should have clubbed him over the head and drug him back here this afternoon when I had the chance. _ In a fit of rage she reared back her foot and kicked the wooden beam of her bed, a action she immediately regretted as a sharp pain shot from her foot and up her spine, exploding behind her eyes in a very bright and colorful display.

"Andraste's flaming tit!" she shrieked grabbing her foot and hopping to keep her balance as she switched between swearing and whimpering. Finally she fell onto her bed and pulled her shoe off the injured foot, frowning over her already bruising toes. She tried to wiggle them but to no avail. Hawke groaned as she inspected the damage. _He finally agrees that we should be together and I break my own toes before he arrives. _Glorious.

"Hawke?" Came a confused voice from her doorway. Shocked out of her self-pity Hawke snapped her head in the direction of the sound to see a very confused and slightly worried mage standing with one foot in her bedroom and a hand braced on the doorway, as if unsure as to whether he should step inside the room or not. "Is everything…" he began slowly before his face became a strange mixture of concerned, serious, and confused. "I heard you yell." Instantly all the blood rushed from her head and into her face, she was fairly certain Bodahn could cook tomorrows supper on her cheeks.

"I think I broke my toes." She said faintly as Anders maneuvered his way to the side of the bed and gently cradled her foot in his hands, cupping her the heel in the palm of his hand while the fingers of his other curled softly around her calf to keep her still. She attempted to wriggle them for his inspection but the swelling had already begun to set in, they were already beginning to be too stiff to move.

"You managed to jam the toes rather spectacularly." A small hint of a smile crossed the flaxen haired mage's lips as he began stroking his thumb over the knuckle of her foot. "But momentarily everything will be set to rights again." Hawke leaned back and watched the man work. Slowly-gently-she felt a soft tingling warmth spread from the tip of his thumb and pulse gently through the breadth of her foot. The gentle heat slowly subsided almost as quickly as it had appeared, leaving her toes feeling a great deal less irritated and stiff than before.

"Thank you." She whispered softly, looking down at the crown of Ander's head, bent so closely to her knees. For the span of a second she considered tackling the man. Using her own leverage she had about a fifty percent chance of successfully knocking him down and tying him to the bedpost. She wasn't sure how to best _keep_ him tied up; however, the ability to control fire somewhat put a damper on using ropes to keep him her pretty prisoner until he succumb to her wiles.

But of course, in all unfairness as soon as he looked up at her with those beautiful honey-gold eyes her mind became an unintelligible jumble of incomprehensibles. Somewhere in the back of her subconscious she could hear a badger screaming about muffins, and the scary part about it was the image actually seemed normal and correct. Hawke couldn't help but feel that romantic love had a stupendous ability to render even the most rational thinking mind a useless puddle of pre-adolescent and hormonal-soaked stupidity.

Lost in her thoughts as she was, she had barely noticed Anders, looking up at her from the floor.

"Hawke?" he chucked. "You look miles away." Mentally Hawke shook herself before-without thinking-she reached down and ran her fingers through the mage's hair.

"I was thinking about badgers and muffins." She replied with a smile, leaning over and grabbing his hand to pull him back to his feet, then tugging him down beside her sitting position on the bed. Anders-for one-didn't resist, she assumed this was due to her comment causing his face to freeze in a strange expression she had never seen him make before.

"Not together I hope," he said with gruff amusement as he landed on the mattress with a light thump, he laughed softly as he saw the blush creep back up into Hawke's face again. "Why did you kick the bed frame if you don't mind me asking?" Hawke was suddenly very interested with a loose string hanging from her finery, Anders laughed and sat up beside her, keeping what he referred to playfully as a "friendly distance."

"I was worried about where you were." She grunted, pulling her knees under her chin and resting her cheek against them. "I've developed a habit of that over the years I'm afraid." She fought a smile from forming as she saw Anders' temper ruffle just a tiny bit in affront.

"I fail to understand why you, Varric, Avaline, Merrill, and Isabella all feel that I am unable to take care of myself. I survived Kirkwall for several months without being discovered without any help in case you forget. I also happen to be a full grown man and accomplished mage. I hardly need a baby sitter." Hawke looked down at his hands, hands that had saved so many lives in the years that she had known him. His aptitude for healing was not something that any mage could learn; it was a gift within itself. But those hands were not the only reason why everyone attempted to keep him safe.

"We care about you Anders. We all try our best to look out for one another. Apostate friends require slightly more attention to keep safe than dwarves and pirates do." She reached out and laced her fingers with his and rubbed her thumb against the back of his hand gently. "You must admit, you don't make not worrying about you an easy task." Anders' eyes popped open and he sputtered.

"Me? What about you? Do you have any idea what it does to me when you go off on some… some _escapade_ and leave me behind in Darktown? You attract bandits and blood mages like a refuse attracts rats. How many times have you returned from a trip, Fenris dragging your tattered body into the clinic and screaming that you were dying? I'm surprised that I haven't gone completely gray!" Anders shook his head. "And that time you were ambushed by the carta while walking through Hightown by yourself? You very nearly died that night."

Hawke flinched, hand instinctively moving to the area just below her left breast. The corrosive poison that she had been jabbed with had killed a lot of healthy tissue before Anders had been able to completely heal her, even after reconstructing the tissue with magic her breathing had never fully recovered. The scar where her flesh had been gouged served as a reminder that despite her prowess in battle and new social status, she was just as delicate and frail as any other person. A particular point that a certain mage kept driving home throughout the entirety of her healing process.

"So you do care about me." She said with a smile, reaching out and placing her hand on the back of his. Hawke watched with quiet sadness as he fought a small struggle against himself not to pull away from her; three years of training yourself to keep your distance from the object of your desire would be a habit that might take awhile to break. Especially when your instincts were warning you that you were going to do nothing more than hurt the one person you actually wanted to touch.

"I love you." He said finally. "Of course I care about you." He refused to meet her eyes as he spoke the words, and his voice sounded almost tight as though he were choking on a bone or having to force the air out of himself in order to speak. Hawke slowly entwined her fingers with his and brought his hand to her cheek, rubbing the beautiful calloused hand against the soft skin of her face, trying to steal as much warmth from the meager contact as possible.

"Hawke… I don't want to hurt you." He whispered softly. "I can't stand the thought of causing you pain, I want you to be able to have a real life with someone who can give you everything: a home, marriage, children. You can't have those things with an apostate." Anders pulled his hand freed of her grasp and held her by the shoulders. "Please understand, I try to keep away to protect you."

"I know that." Hawke leaned forward and buried her face into the crook of his neck, relishing in the smell of him. He always had this earthy tang to his scent, something delightfully musky and male that enticed her like catnip. She parted her lips slightly and kissed the hollow of his neck, ignoring the way his body stiffened against the contact of her lips. "But its been three years now." She slowly trailed her kisses from his neck to the lip of his ear. "We both know that what we feel isn't going to change, I don't want to run away from who I am anymore."

"Who you are…" Anders whispered, focusing on keeping himself calm. "Who are you Hawke?" he pulled slightly away and cupped her face in his hands. For a beautiful moment-just a second-but one that seemed to stretch on forever, a moment where the world narrowed to just the two of them sitting beside one another, looking both into and through one another, staring into each other's eyes.

"I'm yours." Hawke whispered softly, leaning in slowly to press her lips against his before murmuring into them. "I've always been yours. I've loved you since we first-" Anders cut her off, pressing his lips tightly against hers in response to what he could no longer hold back from himself. Wrapping his arms around her slender frame, he repositioned her and pressed himself against her, trailing kisses from her lips to her collarbone as she nipped gently at his earlobe and squeezed gently at his sides.

They went slowly, exploring one another and relishing in what they had denied themselves for so long, and found that their dreams of one another paled in comparison to the reality of laying beside their beloved in the flesh. They laughed and moaned, played and wrestled, dominated and submitted to one another until the inky blackness outside of Hawke's window began to give way to the honey-spun streams of dawn light between the heavy curtains.

It had been simple, it had been soft, and it had been exactly what they each had needed from one another for the first of what they both hoped would be many similar encounters throughout the rest of their lifetimes together.

Finally giving into the body's desire to rest, Hawke pulled the covers up around their bodies and rested her head against her apostate lover's chest and ran her fingers through his small tuft of golden chest-hair, happier than a kitten with a bowl of warm cream. Smiling Anders kissed her on the crown of her head and started chuckling.

"What's so funny?" Hawke asked in mid yawn, looking up at the mage with half-open lids.

"I was just wondering what we are planning on telling Varric. I'm sure he already knows that I wasn't at my clinic tonight, and I'm fairly sure he knew where I was headed after I left the Hanged Man." He trailed his fingertips along Hawke's side and back lazily, causing delightful tickle-shivers to run through her. "You do realize we have to tell him _something_. Maker only knows what he will come up with if we leave everything to his imagination."

"I'll come up with something. Maybe something to do with Grey Warden endurance and ravenous appetites." She chuckled to herself softly. "So tell me Anders, what do you think of sandwiches?"

**Authors Note**: Silly little run-away mind-fluff that I came up with while working on part two of Twilight's Dawn. (Nope it isn't dead, I just haven't been working on part one lately. If you haven't read it already you can get to it via my profile page!) Part two is well over 25 pages already and I haven't even gotten warmed up, I just have to work on stringing everything together. I would just throw out part One if not for the fact that so many people loved it so much.

For the record, this story is very-_very_-rough, I wrote it at work and I didn't bother (nor do I plan to) go back and edit it. I Just hope someone gets some happy-fuzzies from it.


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